Archive for June 4, 2012

Folks in Wisconsin have been busting their ass to recall Governor Scott Walker since February, 2011. They did it. He’s up for a recall vote tomorrow. The polls open in roughly 12 hours.

After having said nothing about that — not a hint of encouragement or comment — this would be what Barack Obama tweeted tonight:

Really?

Where has the Democratic party, and its “support,” been in the last year+?

MIA, that’s where.

Sorry Obama. You don’t understand how important tomorrow’s election is. If Barrett loses, I’m tempted (and I’m not alone) to give up on the Democratic party as a whole, and that would include you.

The battles you pick don’t make sense to me, i.e. renewing the Bush tax cuts. You talked for months — years really — about how you were against them. Then you stood up for a few days in some faux fight and voila, over night you said yes.

Then the Wisconsin recall happened, during which you could have lent support to the folks on the ground, you didn’t do a thing.

If this isn’t a reason to love Twitter, I don’t know what is. You can get the gist of a Fox “News” interview without the agony and fury of having to watch it.

These are tweets from ABC News reporter Matt Negrin about Neil Cavuto, “the most important journalist in business news,” interviewing Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker today.

(Image via screenshot of Fox News commercial.)

Scott Walker is facing a recall election tomorrow so Fox is donating hundreds of thousands of dollars of dollars in-kind campaign contributions to the Walker campaign via hours and hours of television coverage. Poor guy.

Fox, being “fair and balanced” and all, is highlighting poor crybaby Walker’s alleged trials and tribulations at the hands of mean Democrats and God awful unions.

The situation is so dire, and Fox’s concern for Walker is so strong, Fox is pulling out all the stops. It seems to me what with Europe melting down, China faltering and all the attendant ramifications of that, “the most important journalist in business news” would have actual business news to cover, but no. Fox’s focus is winning the election for Walker (and Romney and every Republican in between) so all that silly business stuff will just have to wait until November 7.

Anyway, here’s an outline of the riveting interview:

Get the set-up? Poor baby Walker is a martar in the fight against those spoiled brat union workers, as in teachers, and he’s doing this for you people!

Cavuto gives Walker an opening to talk about how everything in Wisconsin will be wonderful (morning in America) if only the mean people would let go of their hate and try to understand how much he loves everyone.

What? I thought Fox was a hard news outlet. Neil Cavuto is sharing his thoughts? Sounds more like a talk show host. Nah. They wouldn’t let the most important business news guy in the world do that. Would they?

That’s par for the course. When we were working on Outfoxed during the 2004 campaign you wouldn’t believe the difference in how Fox portrayed Bush versus Kerry. Bush was always shown in a very presidential light (always had a suit on, always in very dignified settings) while Kerry was shown in situations where he was sloppily dressed or in short video blurbs when he was caught giggling or something.

Yep. If you were looking for actual content that would be the highlight of the interview. But if you were a Fox regular and could read between the lines, you got a whole lot out of it.

CREW has compiled a list of Congress members likely under investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the House Ethics Committee, the Senate Select Committee on Ethics (Senate ethics committee),the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE), and in some cases, the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

More than 300 Mormon church members wearing their Sunday best marched in the Utah Gay Pride Parade in downtown Salt Lake City.

Mormons have played a large role in helping to pass anti-gay legislation across the country with money, institutional support and dedicated volunteers. While their participation in the parade doesn’t mean institutional change it is a step forward.

Their participation marked the first time such a large group of Mormons took part in the parade, organizers told the Associated Press.

“Please come join Latter-day Saints in extending a message of love and support to our LGBT brothers and sisters by marching in the Utah pride parade. Each step we take will be an outward demonstration of our commitment to loving our neighbors,” Erika E.p. Munson wrote on a Facebook Event page inviting Mormons to the parade. “We are marching for the values of empathy and compassion that the Mormon faith teaches. Recognizing that silence (though coupled with good intentions) may leave some LGBT individuals to seriously question their self-worth in their homes, congregations, and before God, we are marching to save lives. “

Parade grand marshal Dustin Lance Black, an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, tweeted: “In tears. Over 300 straight, active Mormons showed up to march with me at the Utah Pride parade in support of LGBT people.”

Over the weekend a friend of mine told me about the film, Chasing Ice, which debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival:

In the spring of 2005, National Geographic photographer James Balog headed to the Arctic on a tricky assignment: to capture images to help tell the story of the Earth’s changing climate. Even with a scientific upbringing, Balog had been a skeptic about climate change and a cynic about the nature of academic research. But that first trip north opened his eyes to the biggest story in human history and sparked a challenge within him that would put his career and his very well-being at risk.

Chasing Ice is the story of one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of our changing planet. Within months of that first trip to Iceland, the photographer conceived the boldest expedition of his life: The Extreme Ice Survey. With a band of young adventurers in tow, Balog began deploying revolutionary time-lapse cameras across the brutal Arctic to capture a multi-year record of the world’s changing glaciers.

After looking around there a bit (the film will be in theaters this fall), I ended up at the Extreme Ice Survey’s website here.

It is amazing. You’ve got to check it out. Be sure to click on the Time-Lapse Video and Photography tab at the top of the home page. There you’ll find time-lapse videos that stretch over the course of years. Incredible stuff.

As the site says, when it comes to climate change, “seeing is believing.”

Apropos of the post below, this is the kind of wussie bulls–t Obama’s base is sick of:

(Image via CommonCause.org)

Emails Show Obama Fake-Fighting the Drug Industry

If President Obama can’t win a second term, at least he has a promising career as a professional wrestler.

Obamacare emails made public last week show that Obama is skilled at publicly pretending to fight a supposed bad guy — the drug lobby, in this case — while ensuring neither side actually gets hurt, both sides get paid, and everyone can be chums afterward.

Throughout his campaign and while pushing his health care law, Obama regularly spoke as if he were sticking it to the drug industry. But these were phantom punches. Sometimes, the emails show, the drug lobbyists didn’t even blink an eye.

“If the drugmakers pay their fair share,” Obama said in a weekly radio address in June 2009, “we can cut government spending on prescription drugs.”

A CBS News report at the time took this as a threat to the industry, citing the fact sheet the White House published alongside the radio address suggested cutting federal payments for drugs purchased by Medicare patients who are poor enough to qualify for Medicaid (so-called dual-eligibles, or “duals”).

But top PhRMA lobbyist Bryant Hall, a former Democratic Senate staffer, had an advance copy of the script and emailed his colleagues the night before Obama’s address aired. “Background is that the Pres’s words are harmless,” Hall wrote. “He knows personally about our deal and is pushing no agenda.”

Hall assured his colleagues, “The reference to Duals does NOT mean that they want to do the duals policy …. Again — this was a face save, not a real option.”